You may have seen the recent string
of posts about SEO vs. Social Media, starting with this effective, but poorly
argued controversy-bait, which was excoriated by and Hugo Guzman, then followed
up with a more nuanced view by Darren Rowse. While I'm not particularly
interested (nor do I think there's much value) in re-hashing or arguing these
points, I did think the topic warranted attention, as it brings up some
excellent points marketers should carefully consider as they invest in their
craft.
We
Search for What We Want + Need
The search for information and
answers has been essential to humans since time immemorial. And there's no sign
that our latest iteration, web search, is losing any steam:
Even as we've reached a maturity
point with broadband adoption and online population, searches are rising. We're
not searching less every month; we're searching
more.
Search is an intent driven activity.
We don't search casually (much), we search to find answers, information, goods
and services to consume. The power of search marketing - whether paid or
organic - is simple: Be in front of the consumer at the time of consumption.
There's no more effective time to be present and no more effective way of
knowing what is desired. All the social graph analysis in the world won't tell
you that Sunday evening, I got fed up with my current selection of footwear
and, after some searching, spent a few hundred dollars on Zappos. But being front and center when I queried
mens puma shoes brought them some
nice business.
We're
Social to Discover and Share
Social media - whether it's Twitter,
Facebook, Flickr, Reddit, StumbleUpon or something else - is about connections,
interaction, discovery and distraction. We hardly ever use these portals as a
way to find answers, though they certainly may provide plenty to unasked
questions.
Social media marketing advocates
often make the case that social is how we find out about new products on the
web, but, at least so far, the data doesn't back up this assertion:
-
ATG Study on How Users Discover
Products via SearchEngineLand
However, I am strongly inclined to
believe the claim that social media is how we find out about new content on the
web, particularly when we're not seeking something in particular (as with a
search). Blogs, pictures, video, research and the like are surely seeing an
increased share of their visits from social, and that branding exposure is
definitely valuable.
Some recent GroupM Research helped to shed the light of
data on this supposition, noting that:
- The click-through rate in organic search results for
users who have been exposed to a brand's social marketing campaign are
2.4X higher than those that haven't; for paid search, it showed a jump
from 4.5% to 11.8% (in both cases, this is for branded queries)
- Consumers using social media are 1.7x more likely to
search with the intention of making a list of brands or products to
consider purchasing compared to those who do not use social media
Ben Yoskovitz talked about this value in his recent analysis:
Based
on the information in this report, it's reasonable to argue that social media
marketing can increase the quality of leads (and not just the volume). It's
possible to hone in on, and understand intent through search and how social
media exposure affects that intent. And as people are exposed (and I would
say involved with - since exposure sounds like you're just
broadcasting stuff at people, which isn't what social media is about) to social
media their intent is more focused and driven towards lead conversion
That's the kind of social media
marketing value I can get behind. Get exposed to potential customers through
social so that when they build their consideration set, search and purchase,
you'll have a leg up on the competition.
What
Drives Traffic (and Converts) for Whom
It pays to understand the bias of
this flare-up's instigator, and I've got
plenty of compelling data myself to see his perspective. Last weekend, I
started publishing content on a personal blog
- no domain authority, no links and little chance of performing well in search.
But the results from social media - Twitter, Facebook and Hacker News in
particular - are fairly remarkable:
The search traffic demand, all 78
visits, was generated from the articles that went popular on Twitter & HN.
The site itself still doesn't rank for
its own name. Yet, social media sent 22,000 visits over 9 days. No wonder
bloggers, in particular those that monetize through advertising, sponsorships
and other traffic-driven systems, have a proclivity for investing in social
traffic. Perhaps it's not so crazy to suggest on Problogger.net, a site about
growing blog traffic and improving monetization, that social can be
"better" than SEO.
I'd still argue that overall,
referring traffic of all kinds sent from social, particularly from the largest
network (Facebook), is only a fraction of the visits Google sends out each day
(unless you're in the business of
appealing to the Facebook audience biases - I was a bit frustrated with how the
data was clearly manipulated in the reference piece
to fit the story). But, social does eliminate some of the inherent biases that
search engines carry and let content that appeals to social users flourish no
matter the site's ability to grow its link profile, make content accessible to
spiders or effectively target keywords.
Now let's look at an example on the
opposite end of the spectrum - conversions for a B2B product.
SEOmoz's PRO membership may not be a
good investment unless you're a marketer actively engaged with SEO, but given
that both the search and social traffic our site attracts likely fall into this
intent group (interested in SEO and likely to be in web marketing), a
comparison seems fair.
First, I did some prep work in our
Google Analytics account by creating an advanced segment called "social
traffic" that contains any referral source with "twitter,"
"facebook," "stumbleupon," "linkedin,"
"flickr," and "ycombinator" - these represent the vast
majority of our social media sources. Next, I compared this traffic
quantitatively with our search referrals over the past two weeks:
- Social Traffic - 26,599 visits from 30 sources
- Organic Search Traffic - 102,349 from 20 sources
I then compared the percent of these
reaching our landing or purchase pages for PRO membership. Here's organic
search:
And here's social traffic:
Here's what I see:
- 4.5% of organic search visitors considered a purchase
- 1.3% of social traffic considered a purchase
- While I can't disclose full numbers, I can see that a
fair number of search visits converted vs. zero for social.
In fact, looking at the entire year
to date traffic to SEOmoz from social sources, it appears not 1 visit has ever
converted for us. Social may be a great way to drive traffic, build branding
and make a purchase more likely in the future, but from a direct conversion
standpoint, it doesn't hold a candle to search. To be fair, I'm not looking at
full life cycle or even first-touch attribution,
which makes this analysis less comprehensive, though likely still directionally
informative.
Takeaways
Given the research and data here and
in the posts/content referenced, I think we can say a few things about search
and social as marketing channels:
- There shouldn't be a VS.: This isn't about pitting web marketers against each
other (or perhaps, more accurately, themselves, since our industry survey data suggests many of us are
responsible for both). There's obvious value in both channels and to
suggest otherwise is ideological nonsense and worse, self-defeating.
- Search Converts:
$20 Billion+ isn't being wasted on
Google's search ads - that sucker send intent-driven, focused,
conversion-ready visits like nobody else on the web.
- Social Has Value: Those
exposed to a social campaign are better customers and prospects; making
social not only a branding and traffic channel, but an opportunity for
conversion rate optimization.
- SEO Is Hard in the Early Stages: Without a strong link profile, even great content may
not perform particularly well in search results.
- Segmenting Search and Social is Key: Unless you separate, analyze and iterate, you're
doomed to miss opportunities and falsely attribute value. I'm particularly
worried about those marketers who invest heavily in social to the
detriment of SEO because the immediacy of the rewards is so much more
tangible and emotionally compelling
